


Drowning

by lferion



Series: Black Water [1]
Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Angst, Challenge Response, Historical, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-02-19
Updated: 2008-02-19
Packaged: 2017-10-02 09:57:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lferion/pseuds/lferion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A wake-up call for Dr Benjamin Adams</p>
            </blockquote>





	Drowning

**Author's Note:**

> HL50 Prompt #30: Death. Thanks go to Temve for beta-duties.

(Switzerland, Villa Diodati, 1817)

When Byron killed Dr. Benjamin Adams for the second time -- smiling at his arch of agony as breath abandoned him, and laughing, delighted, at his sharp gasp of returning life -- Methos knew he had to leave, or be lost utterly again. He recognized the sense of dissociation between the clear, cold, _quiet_ voice of reason that rang in his mind, and the distant electric bliss that was his body, shuddering toward completion, possessed by Byron's tongue and prick and Presence. This game he knew too well. He had thought he had left it behind millennia ago.

For one absolute and horrified moment it was Kronos' sharp scent in his nose, Kronos' agile, relentless fingers on his throat, not Byron's perfume, Byron's soft, smooth hands. But the harder light of gas overwrote the memory of oil, the yielding bed wrapped him in linen folds, not fur, and most telling of all, Byron's laugh was nothing at all like Kronos' bitter, knowing bray. That alone kept Methos still, all flesh-sense subsumed in the cold wash of fear that had sent his body plummeting from desire to the exigency of defense, motionless, doing _nothing_, and prevented the killing, careless destruction he knew himself too near. Death was always present when he died.

Even Byron might notice that. Byron knew Dr. Adams, not Methos. Dr. Adams was not a killer, had never killed. Dr. Adams yet had his head, and even though the breath in his lungs was still the pained gasps of revival it was breath. Life. Survival.

He would leave, but it would be on his own terms, not those patterned in antiquity. He would leave, and Dr. Adams (profligate, cowardly, finicking park-saunterer that he was) would run once more, then cease to exist while Methos carried on, elsewhere.

Methos forced his breath back to evenness past the pressure on his throat, then allowed the rising tide of sheer physical sensation to retake his flesh. Let Byron finish what he started (oh there was no fear that Byron would take his head, not this century, never mind that he had tasted the lightning now -- the poet was too fond of the good doctor's living assets.)

Let the evening come to the same drugged, over stimulated satiation so many other evenings ending with dawn had come to. Byron's version of ordinary: nothing to be remembered or written about. Unremarkable. Merely an end.

Byron was murmuring fragments of verse, fractured words in his ear. His hips were driving, pounding himself into Adams' tight heat, lost in his own senses. Finally he shuddered to a convulsive stop, jerking and coming with a whimper before collapsing on top of him, half-conscious at most. Methos lay silent, drowned in the featherbed, buried by the poet. The harsh scrape of air in his throat was sense, not sound. Stillness brought him inevitably to his own completion, relief and release spasming through him as Byron softened and slipped from him. He savored the moment, the delicate sensations, the utter privacy of this silent ecstasy.

A fleeting thing. Byron's weight and the constriction of the bedding were calling up those ancient responses already too close to the surface. The words he had spoken to Mary the night Byron had taken Kershner still haunted him -- "the perversion of nature that we are" -- an inadvertent truth like an unsettled Quickening scraping along his nerves. He twisted beneath the weight of the man who had killed him twice now, and slid from the bed, stepping to the window and leaning his damp brow against the chill glass. Behind him, Byron began to snore softly into the hollow he had left.

Twice dead. He didn't count the overturned carriage: that had been an accident in truth, not even the result of Byron's reckless hand on the ribbons. Nor did he count the proof-death it had taken to persuade the poet of their shared Immortality, as he had done that himself. But this was twice now in Byron's bed, at Byron's hand.

Kronos had enjoyed fucking him dead.

Shivering, Adams/Methos set his will to plan yet another flight.


End file.
